This helix arch is my first practice project and Iām so happy with the results
Would any of yall have a moment to help with how I did it?
The file doesnāt look as elegant as the others I see on here (lots of wires coming out of the same block & overlapping wires), is there something Iām missing?
How would I make a bunch of different helices with different angle offsets instead of copy-pasting the whole thing like I did? Is there a way to input a list of Rod_Rotation_Offsets so the whole thing gets batch processed? Manually changing the value and baking it over and over soundsā¦ wrong
Any other rookie mistakes I donāt know Iām doing? I get the feeling Iām brute forcing the maths since I donāt know what tools are available.
Any help is very much appreciated and Iām looking forward to working with yall!
Actually your first GH script looks a lot better than my first one. I tweaked you top set of components to point out a few things:
Each person has their own style, but I like to keep things as close together as possible. Doing this make it easier to end up with everything on one screen with no need for scrolling. (Note that I have a 4K monitor dedicated to GH, and a secondary one for Rhino.)
The Pipe component will take the place of using a circle to transfor a curve into, well, a pipe.
It pretty standard to enter values directly into GH component inputs by right-clicking on them. Ding this makes things slightly less āparametricā, but Iāve found that a lot of GH component values wonāt change even though others are best handled with sliders of something else.
Itās nice to avoid crossing GH wires, and Iāve often gone back to a finished GH file and simply moved things around in order to reduce the number of crossed wires.
About the helix pipes on the outside - Iād do this by starting with a vertically straight pipe and add the helix curves to it. Then use the GH Bend component to make the semi-circle.
Which of the three copies of code should I look at?
We donāt need to see your explorations. The file will be smaller and easier to understand if geometry (breps, curves, points, etc.) are shared (wired) instead of duplicated.
Iāll play around with that bend option, Iām going to be escalating the complexity of the lattice and the arch shape, Iām sure thisāll come in handy!
Would it be better practice to include just the one coil and describe the duplication Iām looking for?
And when youāre talking about including the geometries are you saying that it would be more helpful if I included a Rhino file with the geometries in it and keep them referenced in the GH file (instead of extracting them)?
What I meant was to right-click on an input variable (like the D in IntCrv) move mouse pointer to āSet Integerā, move mouse pointer the the text box, and key in the value you want.
Fortunately this is a lot easier to do than it is to describe in words.
No. What Iām saying is that once internalized (as you have done), itās better to wire them (from a single internalized instance) instead of duplicating them (multiple internalized instances) as you apparently did?
I didnāt study your code carefully, sorry.
P.S. Iāve looked again at your code and WOW I missed many important details
Am tempted to write a full demo of data trees (but I wonāt) where the data(not replicated code fragments) determines how many ācoilsā and their nature (other params) from one set of code to produce geometry as ābranchesā. Hope someone else on this thread can help.
I was wondering why you went with the mass add solution instead of the range, I was theorizing it was a runtime optimization thing.
Would you explain why youād use mass add over range?
GH has lots of surprises that I call āquirksā. This is not surprising when you understand that one person developed the whole thing many years ago.
Youāll learn a lot from this forum - I suggest you visit here once a day.
Pretty kick ass!
And god is PerpFrame perfect for this project!
I went with Point Polar for the coil rotation since the plane rotation on plane rotation started breaking my brain
To @Joseph_Osterās point on data trees, the Simplify/Graft rabbit hole I went down was such an important side quest!
Is it just me or are the tables/data structures in GH kinda fast and loose and a bit hard to visualize? Are there any data visualization tools Iām missing aside from Panel and ListItem?
A couple problems I havenāt figured out yet:
When I use a complicated starting curve, it looks like PerpFrame spaces the frames out closer together at tight curves. Is there a way to Reparameterize the curve so the Frames stay equally spaced?
Also when I set the # of Coils to an even number, Pipe wouldnāt render one of the coilsā¦
But now I canāt recreate the issueā¦
Next Iāll start checking out @Birk_Binnardās Bend recommendation and see whatās up with that.
This thread is starting to drift from the original topic, though Iād love to keep this going here for simplicity of my records. Is that alright with yall?
No particular reason.
With Mass Add the input defines the rotation angle of each individual plane. (e.g. 34Ā°)
With Range the input defines the rotation angle of the last plane and, of course, calculates the angle of all planes.
I missed many important details 
